The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.

In a racially separated world, it’s possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them.

Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have.

They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them.

Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones.

They were braving the worst of an industrial system, the fruits of which liberals enjoyed from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states.

Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a “cancer slope factor,” the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: “Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish,” the document reads.

If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.